Chapter 332: Return
Time soon passed after the escape and three days went in the blink of an eye.
For three agonizing days and nights, the remnants of Class F had been running through the jagged, muddy labyrinth of the Neutral Zone. They didn’t stop to sleep. They barely stopped to drink from the muddy streams that trickled through the canyon floors.
Lukas stumbled over a jagged root, falling hard onto his knees in the damp earth. He didn’t use his hands to catch himself. He couldn’t. Without the Dwarven Magitech Gauntlets that Prince Hephaestus had forged for him,
his biologically fried arms were useless, reduced to blistered, agonizing dead meat from his past injuries . He let out a ragged, dry heave, his chest heaving as he stared at the mud.
"Get up, Lukas," Alaric grunted, his voice sounding like two stones grinding together.
Alaric wasn’t faring much better. The giant boy was a walking casualty.
His breathing was heavy, and the mechanical thumping of the Titan’s Capacitor fused to his sternum had slowed to a weak, strained rhythm]. But the heaviest burden wasn’t his exhaustion—it was the weapon strapped to his back.
The newly transformed Sword of Heroes, the colossal gunmetal buster sword laced with golden veins of divinity, had become an anchor. When he first pulled it from the pedestal, his sheer, stubborn willpower had commanded the blade.
But now, running on fumes, the divine artifact was rejecting him. It demanded a master with a pure, overwhelming Order, and Alaric simply didn’t have the mana or the mastered intent to synchronize with it. It weighed him down like a literal mountain, dragging a deep trench into the dirt with every step he took.
"I can’t," Lukas wheezed, rolling onto his back and staring up at the sliver of grey sky visible between the canyon walls. "My core is empty. I don’t have the gauntlets... I’m just a liability."
"We are not leaving you," Elena said firmly.
The High Elf Princess glided down from a scouting position on a nearby ridge. Her pristine white uniform was stained brown and red, and her emerald eyes were dull with extreme mana exhaustion. She tapped her temple, wincing as a sharp migraine spiked through her skull.